Linux

This is EXTREMELY disappointing. KDE is my favourite DE.

World sees AI doing awful things like nudifying children, making nearly every software we use worse, and stealing the world's knowledge to sell back to us, and generally dislikes AI.

Moronic software devs with massive egos: "WE SHOULD USE AI SEE HOW EASY THIS MAKES MY LIFE NOW I DONT HAVE TO LEARN. "

Also them: "I swear I just use it to augment my work! I'd never take a shortcut and eventually keep taking shortcuts and outsource my thinking! Humans notoriously NEVER take shortcuts!"

Guys wtf are we even doing anymore.

Actual proposed policy:

Nobody in KDE should know if you use an LLM — not because you're concealing it, but because your usage of it produces output indistinguishable from what you could produce yourself. Contributions with obvious and lazy LLM usage may be ignored or closed.

Generally, don't. What you are willing to write is generally the upper limit of what others are willing to read. LLMs, on the other hand, often produce long, rambling, soulless, corporate-sounding nonsense that nobody wants to read; don't do it. This includes:

Don't use an LLM to "organize your thoughts" and copy-paste the output somewhere. Organize them yourself. Don't use an LLM to generate commit messages and merge request descriptions. Write them yourself. Don't use an LLM to generate a reply to someone's question or comment, then copy-paste that as if it were your response. Understand and reply yourself.

The one acceptable usage is to write text in your native language and then machine-translate it into English, with no stylistic or tonal changes.

But of course reading is for the LLM, it's far better to be outraged about 'hopping on the Pro-AI train'.

this is quite... disappointing, and I say that as someone who uses primarily GNOME :(

It's a actually completely reasonable proposal

It all comes down to one thing - understand the LLM generated code you want to submit, and use the LLM for nothing else than write code, like making other people having to read LLM text. This is a whole lot like the kernel's LLM policy.

Niko is right, the environmental corcern is not something this policy should go against - what can they do despite ban LLM usage altoguether (and per consequence get LLM generated code submitted anyway), they can't have a blacklist for models, or force contributors to run them on their local hardware.

I do kinda get Niccolo's point that a contribution policy is not the place to decide environmental concerns even though it feels contradictory at first glance. He's generally very critical and nuanced when it comes to LLMs so I wouldn't call him "pro-AI". Just watch his YouTube content.